The present invention relates to a character recognition apparatus capable of effectively recognizing characters written on a sheet of paper or the like.
Various types of character recognition techniques have been recently developed to recognize handwritten characters. In order to perform character recognition, a character image portion is detected and is selected from a relatively large observation area. The selected character image portion is then subjected to predetermined image processing so as to recognize a character written in this image portion. In general, character image detection and its subsequent selection are called segmentation. Segmentation is performed independently of character recognition processing. In addition, segmentation is performed in accordance with pitch data of a character image, the presence of a white area, an artificially plotted timing mark, and so on. For this reason, several types of restrictions are imposed when a user writes characters to be recognized on paper. Conventionally, for example, a character entry frame is printed on a sheet of paper, and the user must write characters within this frame. Therefore, when the characters are written on paper without any marking or character frames, the characters cannot be effectively recognized. There has been a demand for the development of a character recognition apparatus capable of effectively recognizing characters which are written on paper without any marking or character frames.